


Monsters Among Us

by kabeswaters



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Light Swearing, but is it happening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 17:22:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17104889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kabeswaters/pseuds/kabeswaters
Summary: After a year of dating Remus, noticing he disappears every month, and only getting lies when you ask why, you begin to suspect he has been cheating on you.





	Monsters Among Us

It began as an odd reoccurrence, a pattern of leaving that was covered up by excuse after excuse. Ones you believed, like when James told you, “he’s feeling terrible, Y/N,” or Peter said, “there are some family issues that he has to attend to,” or when Sirius would wave his hand in the air and say, “you’re making a fuss over nothing”, because there was no reason to doubt them. Or, really, no reason to doubt Remus. Remus who drank hot chocolate and wore sweaters too big for his torso and smiled shyly and sweetly. Remus who had asked you out a year ago, a scalding red hue streaked across his freckled face, and was never late to a date or raised his voice around you or told any of the abundance of secrets you had shared with him. Remus, who you trusted with every bone in your body and every pound of your heartbeat ever since meeting him, and never did anything worthy enough to break it. 

But maybe, the very parts of Remus that made him seem faithful could have spelled demise from the beginning. Because it had been another repetition of three days where Remus had just mysteriously disappeared, and after a year’s worth of excuses, the other three boys were running out of lies to tell you. Lies that you never knew were lies until, at breakfast one morning, they looked around at one another, mouths agape, waiting for each other to say where Remus was, but none of them actually answering.

You glanced at the three of them like they looked at one another. “What?” you asked, not bothering to smother your annoyance over with something sweeter. “It’s not a difficult question.”

Sirius cleared his throat. “Moony is, uh, requesting to be left alone in our dorm. A relative, a Great Uncle, if I’m correct, right guys”—you watched as Peter and James nodded their heads as unconvincingly as Sirius spoke— “passed away last night. He’s fairly torn up about it.”

A cold smile crawled up your lips. “A Great Uncle, really?” you inquired, causing Sirius to nod with a mouthful of Cornish pasty in his mouth. “This wouldn’t be the same Great Uncle that died, say, three months ago, when Remus went missing just like this?” 

Suddenly, the bite of Cornish pasty flew out of Sirius’ mouth, landing in an unappealing splat on Sirius’ filled plate. “Listen… Y/N… you’ve got to understand…”

“Understand what?” you spat. “I’m his girlfriend, and for some reason, he keeps disappearing for a few days every month. You guys won’t tell me why, he won’t tell me why, so I suspect he’s up to something he wants to keep a secret from me. Another girl, perhaps?”

You didn’t mean to let it slip out of your mouth, the fear of someone else, though it had been plaguing your mind incessantly, keeping you from sleeping and eating and paying attention in lessons. Every thought you had somehow looped back to this mysterious mistress you had convinced yourself Remus had. In your mind, she had a voice like honey and hair of that same shade and a body that curved in all the right spots. In your mind, she was witty and well-read and knew how to speak in at least five languages. In your mind, Remus loved her more, loved her in a dangerously seductive kind of way that made your stomach lurch and your heart feel like someone set it on fire.

As soon as it came out, like a river that rushed through a broken dam, Sirius and James and Peter were all over you and one another’s sentences. They promised you it was an exaggeration, that Remus loved you far too much to ever cheat. But you shook your head at them. “I can’t be over exaggerating if it’s so bad none of you guys will tell me what’s going on. So I’ll be on my way to your dorm to disturb his,”—you put your hands up in air-quotes— “‘mourning’.” 

Peter grabbed your wrist, pulling you back in so fast your head got foggy. “Please, no, Y/N. Let him be.”

“Sorry,” you chuckled, prying your hand away right before his other one flew by in an attempt to latch on. “But I’m done being lied to. I deserve more than this.”

You could feel their eyes stiff on you as you sprinted out of the Great Hall, never reaching a steady pace, only getting faster and faster as you got closer. So you paused, breathless, right at the dorm door. Behind your staggered exhales, you could hear the creaking of a bed, the sharp intake of breath from inside the room. In a moment of helplessness you fell, palms-first, against the hallway wall, reluctant to open the door and ruin the best relationship of your life. But was it the best if he had been cheating on you for an entire year? Was it the best if he convinced all of his friends to lie about it to your face? Was it the best if every sweet word he ever said, every tender moonlit kiss and brushing back of hair behind ears was done imagining, wishing, your face was someone else’s?

The door was open before you even realized you had moved, that your hand was on the knob. You didn’t mean it to slam, but the wood hit the plaster on the wall and Remus jumped up from his bed as a response. He was shirtless: a bad sign. His hair was awry: a bad sign. Fresh scars graced his skin, as if someone was scraping up and down his back while they were…

He was full of bad signs. It didn’t help when he grabbed a blanket from his bed, covering his torso with it.

“You have to leave right now,” he demanded. That only caused you to step into his room further.

You cocked an eyebrow at him, knowing, regardless of the darkness brought by the curtained windows, he could see it. He could feel it. “Why?” you asked. “So you can keep screwing the girl you’ve been cheating on me with?”

Remus’ eyebrows scrunched up in confusion, his lips pursing slightly. “What are you talking about? I’m not—”

“Really?” you interrupted while approaching his bed. “So, if I come over here, I won’t see a girl…” Your sentence trailed off because you didn’t see one. Even after searching under pillows and quilts and peeking your head to see beneath the bed. Rapidly, you turned to Remus, who had the audacity to be smirking. “What? You think it’s amusing that you’ve been treating me so badly I think you’re cheating on me?”

His face fell. “No.” 

Like a wildfire you jumped over to him, blazing with red anger and incessant ferocity. “I mean, look at your skin, Remus. Your hair. Your lips. They’re swollen. Even if she’s not here, she was. And you let her touch you and kiss you and you did that back.” You shoved him backward, reveling in how he stumbled. 

He held his hands out in front of his body, alongside the blanket, as if it were some force-field. “I swear I’m not cheating on you. Why the hell would I do that?”

“Beats me.” You were approaching his space again, backing him up across the carpet, and soon he’d be pinned against the wall. Your stomach dropped at the thought of him already having his back pressed against it early in a much different tone. The sadness didn’t echo in your voice, luckily, as you continued, “but unless you give me proof you aren’t, I’m breaking up with you, right here, right now.”

“Please don’t.” It was broken and vulnerable and manipulatively so, you decided. “I promise I’m not cheating on you.”

“Then why are you gone all the time? Then why, the one time I find you when you’re missing, do you look like this?”

Suddenly, Remus’ focus was on the ground, his voice as uncertain as his posture. “I… I can’t tell you.”

“You don’t have a choice, Remus. You tell me or I’m walking out of that door and never dating you again.” He was silent, still looking at the floor as if trying to act invisible, and it only spurred you on more. “For the love of God, Remus, say something!” you screamed. “Tell me what’s going on! I want an answer, goddamnit!”

Your hands were on his shoulders again, shaking them violently, when he looked up at you. There was a fire in his eyes, but not one belonging to a hearth, producing the kind of warm hominess Remus usually emitted. This was dark and amber and distant and caused your throat to choke up. “This is my business,” he grumbled. Though it was said quietly, there was a sternness in the delivery that made it so Remus’ sentence didn’t have to be a scream to cause a shiver to run up your spine. “What happens once a month only concerns me and, if you don’t trust me enough to shut up about it, maybe we should break up.”

The air was tense with silence. Unwillingness to move as you both stood there, considering one another, waiting for something. Anything. You couldn’t break up with Remus, leave his laughter, abandon his empathy, desert his devotion. But you couldn’t stay like this, trapped on some kind of mad carnival ride that shot you down to your demise once a month without warning.

“Do you really mean that?” you asked, looking up at him, hating yourself for wanting to rub a new scar off of his cheek with your thumb.

Remus faltered momentarily. “Do you?” There was a tenderness to it, so thick it was tangible, so earnest it made tears build up in your eyes and you nodded in response, afraid your mouth might say something too impulsive if you let it answer instead.

It took a breath, or two, or three, for you to feel settled enough to speak. “I can’t be with someone who keeps doing this to me. It’s not fair.”

Remus snickered. “Life isn’t fair. Get used to it.”

“Well, you know, there are a lot of things people can’t control that are unfair and they have to live with that and it sucks. But if the person I date goes missing for four days every month and comes back looking like they slept with someone else and won’t tell me why they ware missing, that’s a situation I can control, that I can get out of. In fact, that is a situation I am going to get out of.”

You stormed to the door harshly, as if trying to punch holes in the ground with your feet. It stung through your shoes but nothing compared to the slow shredding of your heart by Remus’ words, so you kept on, almost reaching the door before Remus grabbed your wrist and flipped you around.

“Want to talk about things people can’t control that are unfair and they have to live with?” he asked in a way that didn’t warrant a response. “I’m a werewolf. And I have been since I was five. I leave every month because that’s when I transform, and I can’t risk hurting anyone. Especially you. And I can’t do anything, because when I don’t tell people, they think I’m being a shitty human being. And when I do tell them, they treat me like some bomb about to explode. So I have the lads lie about it because they are the only three people who have stayed. And I had the lads lie to you about it because I was hoping you would want to stay, too. And maybe if you stayed long enough you would realize I’m not some monster. You wouldn’t be afraid.”

Somewhere along the line, the blanket had been forgotten about, either fallen out of hands or knowingly discarded from them. So, as you absorbed Remus’ words, you were simultaneously consumed with the scars and bruises and bumps that covered all over his torso and chest and neck, following the trail of them up to his eyes. “I’ve never been scared of you,” you promised. “Just scared of a made-up girl I thought you loved more than me.”

A laugh left Remus’ lips. It was airy and had a sugary-sweetness about it that began softening the air in the room, disassembling the tension it held. “I literally couldn’t love anyone more than I love you,” he said. And he was smiling; it shone like a gem in the dim daylight.

You weren’t sure how or when the repositioning occured, but suddenly you were facing Remus entirely, his hands in yours, yours in his, fingers sliding through one another’s lazily. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. That you had to tell me something so personal out of a threat to break up.” Your face fell at the admission of guilt.

“Hey,” Remus said, letting go of your hand for only a moment to lift your chin up with the calloused pads of his fingers. “I gave you the same threat and distrusted you the same amount. We both really screwed up. But we’re okay now, right?”

You looked at Remus. Remus who drank hot chocolate, was never late to a date or told any of the abundance of secrets you had shared with him. Remus, who you trusted with every bone in your body and every pound of your heartbeat ever since meeting him, and never did anything worthy enough to break it. Not even this.

“Of course,” you smiled, feeling your heart alongside the edges of your lips.

With his fingers still on your chin, Remus pulled your mouth onto his, gently, coaxing lips apart, leaving you feeling like flowers were growing through your ribs from the bottom of your stomach. The petals kept opening, tickling ribs, leaving a fluttering sensation behind.

Remus pulled back and then you pulled back further, stepping backwards just slightly. With great intention you looked up and down at his skin, letting your knuckles brush lightly against his scars, amazed and agonized at the stories they told. “You’re not a monster,” you reassured while brushing, brushing, brushing. “You’re just a guy with… with a small issue.”

His smile was so bright it radiated onto your skin. “The lads call it my ‘furry little problem’,” he said, and you both laughed, together, harmony and melody.

“Furry little problem,” you repeated. “I like that. I like it a lot.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was requested by an anonymous user on Tumblr. Find me there under the same name @madforscamander


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